Posts By Date (Post Archive)

Whole-genome Sequencing in Autism

January 16, 2019, 11:13AM

A multi-institute research team, which includes Carnegie Mellon Dept. of Statistics & Data Science faculty and graduate students, has published the largest study to date for whole-genome sequencing in autism in which they discovered tens of thousands of rare mutations in noncoding DNA sequences and assessed if these contribute to autism spectrum disorder.

Kathryn Roeder, the UPMC Professor of Statistics and Life Sciences, and Ph.D. students Kevin Lin and Lingxue Zhu, were among the researchers who used cutting-edge statistical models to analyze data from 1,902 families comprised of both biological parents, a child affected by autism and an unaffected sibling.

Entitled “Genome-wide de Novo Risk Score Implicates Promoter Variation in Autism Spectrum Disorder,” and published Dec. 14 in Science, the study is one of 13 released Dec. 14 as part of the first round of results to emerge from the National Institute of Mental Health’s PsychENCODE consortium – a nationwide research effort that seeks to decipher how noncoding DNA contributes to psychiatric diseases such as autism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.

For years, scientists have...

CMU Presidental Fellows

September 25, 2018, 12:15PM

Theresa is a second year PhD student in the department working on characterizing the morphologies of precancerous cells using modern statistical methods like random forests. Currently, she is focusing on analyzing cells from patients with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, an inherited disease involving a mutation in a tumor suppressor gene. Recent awards include a 2018 Honorable Mention in the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, 1st place in the 2018 Scientific and Public Affairs Advisory Committee Statistical Significance Poster Competition at the national Joint Statistical Meetings, and Best in Show at the 2018 CMU HackAuton.

Ronald Yurko is a second year PhD student in the department working on developing methodology for behavioral data science or how people interact with and generate populations of data analysis workflows. His current work is largely centered on analyzing how students visualize and write about data using a mixture models adapted for use with text and circular data. Ron is also very active in sports analytics and has built multiple software packages (e.g. nflscrapR) used across the country that promote...

Brain Research

November 9, 2017, 12:17PM

Brain-related disorders impact almost everyone, either directly or through family or friends. For many of the disorders, whether they’re psychiatric or neurological, there are basic scientific descriptions and valuable treatment options, but none has a satisfactory cure because the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood.

The federal government launched the BRAIN Initiative in 2013 to ignite the development and application of new technologies needed for major advances toward understanding the brain. Carnegie Mellon University’s Rob Kass believes brain research is in desperate need of cutting-edge statistics, which can and should supply a crucial link between new, highly complex data and the thorough scientific explanations the research aims to generate.

As the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies’ 2017 R.A Fisher Lecturer, Kass outlined his case in “The Importance of Statistics: Lessons From the Brain Sciences.”

“Most people have no idea how advanced statistical thinking can elevate research and accelerate scientific discovery,” said Kass, Rob Kassthe Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Computational...

Women in Statistics Presentation

October 19, 2017, 2:57PM

Recent Dept. Ph.D. graduate Samrachana Adhikari will present “Post PH.D. Academic Life” on Oct. 30, sponsored by the Dept.’s Women in Statistics group. The talk will be held at 3:00 p.m. in the Steinberg Auditorium, Baker Hall A 53. Everyone is invited. Sam, a 2017 Ph.D. recipient, is a post-doctoral fellow in Statistics in the Dept. of Healthcare Policy and the Dept. of Biostatistics at Harvard Medical School.

Two CMU Statistics Professors Earn NSF Career Awards

February 23, 2016, 1:56PM

The National Science Foundation has awarded Carnegie Mellon University’s Jing Lei and Ryan Tibshirani Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards.

Lei and Tibshirani, both assistant professors in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Department of Statistics, each received five-year, $400,000 grants for their projects “Modernizing Classical Nonparametric and Multivariate Theory for Large-scale, High-dimensional Data Analysis” and “Locally Adaptive Nonparametric Estimation for the Modern Age — New Insights, Extensions, and Inference Tools,” respectively.

The CAREER Award is the NSF’s most prestigious honor designed to support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through their outstanding research and excellent teaching.
“These CAREER awards are a testament to the innovative contributions that both Ryan and Jing are making in their research,” said Christopher R. Genovese, head of the Statistics Department. “They are emerging leaders in the field, and their work is advancing our understanding of statistical inference with large, complex and high-dimensional data.

...

Schafer Elected Co-chair of LSST Statistics Science Collaboration

December 7, 2015, 3:47PM

Chad Schafer has been elected co-chair of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Informatics and Statistics Science Collaboration. Starting in 2022, the LSST will digitally image the sky every night for a decade. The massive camera will gather roughly 30 terabytes - or 30,000 gigabytes - each night, creating "big data" for astronomy like never before. To help prepare for the data challenges, Schafer, associate professor of statistics in the Dietrich College, will lead the team to develop new methods to analyze and gain scientific insight from the data collected.

http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/april/survey-telescope.html

Using Science and Data To Make a Difference - Ryan Tibshirani

December 7, 2015, 3:23PM

Ryan Tibshirani’s father is a statistician, but that is not the reason he went into the field. To Tibshirani, statistics is special because of its broad potential to impact almost any domain or field.

“I went into statistics because I enjoy the beauty and elegance of math, but I wanted to feel more closely connected to science and data,” said Tibshirani, assistant professor of statistics in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “I found my own way to statistics because I loved the subject, but being able to share this passion and publish papers with my father is very special.”

At Carnegie Mellon University, Tibshirani is involved in both undergraduate and graduate teaching and research. In his research, he develops mathematical models that work to understand simple patterns or structures that may be present in complicated data sets. With these models, he can leverage patterns and structures to predict unseen values of data. This concept can be applied to many different scientific domains.

For example, with Roni Rosenfeld, a professor in the School of Computer Science, Tibshirani formed the research group DELPHI, which...

Lehoczky, Rajkumar and Sha to Receive IEEE Simon Ramo Medal

December 7, 2015, 3:19PM

IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization, will award Carnegie Mellon University faculty members John Lehoczky and Ragunathan “Raj” Rajkumar and the University of Illinois’ Lui Sha, a CMU alumnus, with the 2016 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal, which recognizes technical leadership and contributions to fundamental theory, practice and standardization for engineering real-time systems.

Lehoczky, Ragunathan and Sha are being honored for revolutionizing how systems handle tasks with deadlines under serious weight, power and space constraints. Their work has been used on the original Mars Rover, NASA’s Space Station, submarines, military jets and GPS satellites.

The trio will receive their medals, sponsored by the Northrop Grumman Corporation, at the IEEE Honors Ceremony in New York City on June 18.

Lehoczky, the Thomas Lord University Professor of Statistics and Mathematical Sciences, has been on the CMU faculty since 1969. In addition to his work studying stochastic processes and how they can be used to model real applications, he is well known for applying stochastic modeling to problems in finance. He helped create CMU’s unique...

Tartan Sports Analytics Club Selected as Finalist for "Outstanding New Initiative"

December 4, 2015, 2:40PM

Our new statistics department-sponsored student organization, Tartan Sports Analytics Club, was honored last night as a finalist for "Outstanding New Initiative" at the Student Organization & Award Recognition ceremony. The SOAR Awards are annually presented by the CMU Office of Student Activities and Student Government.

You can learn more about the Tartan Sports Analytics Club here:
http://cmusportsanalytics.wordpress.com
and follow them @CMUAnalytics.

Rebecca Nugent wins the ASA Waller Education Award

December 4, 2015, 2:34PM

We are thrilled to announce that Rebecca Nugent is this year's winner of the American Statistical Association Waller Education Award. The award was meant to highlight an individual's commitment to teaching statistics, and their innovation in the field. Awardees are also selected for work that is impactful in the field of statistics beyond their own teachings and institution. The award is given based on letters of recommendation from students, and colleagues, and supervisors.

You can read more about the Waller Awards here:
http://www.amstat.org/awards/wallereducationaward.cfm

Congratulations, Rebecca!

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